Both The Economist and the Telegraph have articles this week on supposedly middle-aged males, in both Britain and the U.S., who feel "lost." Some have retreated into despair and commit suicide at a higher than average rate. Among their problems is the dicey economy which results in job loss without the ability to land on their feet in a comparable position.

This makes for an interesting story. But is it really a dominant trend?

Alongside these so-called lost souls are plenty of caveman types making millions on Wall Street and pulling off lucrative real estate deals. I write for them and they are totally focused on goals.

There are also the middle-aged males who have endured the dark night of the soul. But, unlike those portrayed in the Telegraph article, they know how to find support. I encounter them all the time in 12-step programs. It's an amazing buddy system.

And there is that group of comebacks. Among them is middle-aged Henry Blodget who leads wildly successful Business Insider. I have a hunch that when former McKinsey head, Rajat Gupta, completes his prison term for insider trading, he will also re-engineer himself.

In addition, there are plenty of lost middle-aged women. They are less visible because they are able to take refuge in traditional security blankets like religion, volunteer work and visiting their grown children. But, penetrate that veneer of doing-okay and the suffering is palpable. It seems to come down to this: They are unable to get started on another satisfying path. Their work life stalled. The spouse or lover is gone. Close friends have distanced themselves.

In my own middle years, that period was a continual fluctuation of being lost and then finding something to hold onto, for a while. Somehow most of us, male and female, do make it to old age. That's where I have been for about a decade. So far, I have gotten lost twice. So?

February 27, 2015

"In a memo to a stunned staff [at the Daily News] on Thursday, [Mort] Zuckerman announced he had hired investment bank Lazard to explore a sale." - Keith J. Kelly, New York Post, February 26, 2015. Here is the article.

If the money-losing Daily News is sold and reconfigured as something else, that will be no loss to readers. There's redundancy in that tabloid category. Anyway, for the dirt, many of us first click on the New York Post.

The loss will be to the employees. The journalists and editors will hit the mean streets of New York City, already glutted with unemployed and underemployed writers from the print era. It will be difficult for them to land a comparable position.

If they attempt to retool their skills and portfolio for another type of writing they will find a glut there too. The exceptions include some niches in which there is plenty of demand. Among those are financial, medical, healthcare policy, technical and high-end copywriting.

Advice: Develop news skills that are in demand now, before you find yourself without a job.

"Ron Johnson ... just led a $16 million investment in the e-commerce startup Nasty Girl to help it expand its brick-and-mortar presence." - Julian D'Ornfro, "Former Apple retail genius and ousted JCPenney CEO Ron Johnson is coming back in a big way," Business Insider, February 27, 2015. Here is the article.

Brick & Mortar is a tough game. Just look at the humbling Staples has lived through. Its new strategy, as it absorbs its acquisition of Office Depot, is to focus on online sales. At its retail operations everything it touched seemed to turn to ashes. That ranged from consumer electronics to Easy Tech services.

This blog wishes Johnson the best. But his track record with it-sells-itself Apple retail may not help much with less powerful brands. At JCPenney he was out of touch with the ethos of Extreme Bargain-Hunting. I returned to that store when it flooded my email with deep-discount promotions, along with additional 10-percent-off coupons. I made out better on my entire winter clothing needs than I would have at an upscale consignment store.

Both the judge and one juror asked Trae Vassallo what "thought leadership" meant. This is the trial which shouldn't have been. It's shocking that, to keep how business is done under wraps, venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins didn't settle with plaintiff Ellen Pao. She contends she was discriminated against because of gender and as punishment after ending a sexual relationship.

To most of us in communications, "thought leadership" means having the ability to establish what memes will embed themselves in the collective unconscious of a niche.

In the technology niche, a dominant thought leader is Peter Thiel. In public relations, Richard Edelman achieved that influence partly through creating the annual trust survey which he presents at the World Economic Forum in Davos every year. In spirituality it's American-born Buddhist nun Pema Chodron. In science it's Stephen Hawking.

The challenge with thought leadership is sustainability. When thought leaders lose their hold on the minds and hearts of their followers they risk become jokes. As Shakespeare hammered in his history plays: The crowd is fickle.

One-time thought leader about management Jack Welch is being panned in comments in The Wall Street Journal. To those giving the thumbs-down his (and his wife's) new book "The Real Life M.B.A." doesn't seem to say anything new. In 2015, thought leadership demands disruptive memes.

Thought leaders who endure? Shakespeare's ability to shape memes has continued throughout the centuries. So has that of Jesus.

"Weight Watchers is losing the race for customers against fitness gadgets. Revenue fell 10 percent ... declining for the eighth straight period as FitBit, Jawbone and other activity trackers lure dieters away."

Clearly, the takeaway for thought leaders is to create a bond with followers by providing them something to track. All the time. If your message deals with the need to invest for retirement, then they should be tracking weekly the current and future cost of living in the one, two or three locations they will live in after they finish their careers. The must indicators to check would be housing prices, property taxes, cost of dental implants and food for two.

The shrewd pioneers who founded the Twelve Step Programs had members track daily how long they had been off the bottle. That's reinforced at meetings with the giving of recognition chips for 24 hours, one month, 60 days, 90 days, six months, one year and multiples of years. If you're part of the in-crowd, there might even be a cake to celebrate.

And in those scary days when I hung out a shingle at the end of the 1980s, I tracked how many pieces of marketing snail mail I would send out. No, I didn't compute the ROI on that. The tracking was enough to keep me going. Today, I still track, only it's the digital communications. Without tracking I lose my selling motivation.

It should have dawned on Weight Watchers to create an app to track the changes within the body which signal emotional messages to eat, when not hungry. The meetings would be packed.

First it was rats which were invading the designer ethos of Vogue at One World Trade Center. Dropping were everywhere. Now and then a rodent would leap onto the desks.

Now, it's a human or humans making buttered popcorn in the microwave. Sometimes there is an alleged cooking-up of barbecued food.

Downscale edibles such as those, reports Kirsten Fleming at the New York Post, are offensive to the sensibilities of the fashionistas. You bet, they are on the look-out for that miscreant or miscreants. They could be banished from the Rat Kingdom to doing copywriting for Plus-Size "youthful" summer clothes.

"Things have grown ever more extraordinary for the one percent on four wheels. The fancy cars seem to be multiplying and taking unexpected shapes." - Kyle Stock, "Hyper-Luxury Cars Are Now Selling Faster Than Normal Ones," Bloomberg, February 25, 2015. Here is the article.

The huge sales of super luxury designer brand cars might have generated a major tipping point. We strivers who toyed with the idea that someday somehow we could become rich might have finally embraced that isn't going to happen. We can now get on with our little lives. And achieve a sense of accomplishment that we can pay our bills, enjoy off-budget items now and then and give into our animal companion's whims (such as for pricey treats).

A few months ago I had the internal paradigm shift to self-love after paying off my downscale Chevy Cobalt 3.5 years early. When you accept who you are (barely middle class) no rich acquaintance or even client can tamper with your high self-esteem.

Sure, I might sound like self-pitying Richard Nixon reflecting on his humble wife, Pat, and her cloth coat. But, you have to give it to that guy, he had the guts to experiment with personas. He may have a major comeback among historians. In terms of understanding all the world is a stage, he could be elevated right up there with Ronald Reagan.

"Simon & Schuster has won the bidding for the first book by former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson since she was booted from her job last May ..." - Keith J. Kelly, "Ex-Times editor Jill Abramson inks $1M book deal," in the New York Post, February 25, 2015. Here is the article.

Supposedly the focus of this future book is the future of media. That, of course, is a crowded space. Daily, just in the inbox of my email, I receive non-stop articles, webinars and book excerpts on this subject. Can Abramson really provide new insight? That could be possible through her reporter's skills.

Or maybe not. The interest in the book could be the hope that she dishes the dirt on the high-profile players at The New York Times. Gossip is fun. And the most juicy bits can come from a woman scorned. In this situation, it wasn't by a lover but her employer.

If the book turns out to be gossipy, a good time is ahead for all of us.

That's what the new client told me last night, 8 P.M., his LA time, and 9 P.M., my Tucson, Arizona time. And that was about the seventh time I had heard that since I had relocated my communications boutique from New York Metro area last April.

I had a hunch that time zones mattered. After all, since 2004, I had been hustling from my home office in New Haven, Connecticut to get business assignments from California, Colorado and Texas. The dismal result was one account.

So, I do the A/B testing. I moved here. It took about four months for me to learn how to do business in the West. It's more laid-back and friendly than the fierce task orientation of Manhattan. I had to calm down. Listen. Do pleasant follow-up.

The good news is that I still retain my ability to bag East Coast assignments. That will probably never leave me.

So, to use the cliché, I have the best of both coasts. But, even in this global economy that's totally connected digitally, you probably have to be based in the region where the lion's share of your assignments will be. People simply don't like to time travel.